Trioncube Hands-on

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We take a look at Namco Bandai's upcoming tile stacker on the Nintendo DS.

By Craig Harris

Over the years, so many development teams have tried to capture the same magic that Tetris had in its debut, simply by copying the formula and shifting things around to create their own design. Namco Bandai's giving the genre another shot on the Nintendo DS (Pac Attack was one of the company's first attempts), this one putting heavy emphasis on combo strings. And sometimes, the best part of an action puzzler is managing to string together some truly awesome combos.

Trioncube is a very simple, Tetris-esque concept where the task is to rotate and stack falling blocks to form three-by-three squares of tiles. Doing so will activate the combo string, which can then be continued by adding more and more three-by-three squares to the activated area. When you're all out of moves or you run out of time to keep it going, the tiles responsible for the combo string turn into coins, which convert into points...and each level has a specific quota to reach in order to move on. The tiles fall in threes, with some pretty crazy stacks that aren't always easy to arrange.

The presentation of Trioncube is clearly one that the development team had a lot of fun creating. It's clear that the Namco Bandai team that worked on Katamari Damacy had influence over the Trioncube design team, as you'll find some crazy, quirky happenings between levels that's simply too bizarre to explain properly. Perhaps checking out some of our screenshots will explain just how odd the game's theme is.

Trioncube doesn't support internet play, but it does have a decent focus on multiplayer using the Nintendo DS system's Download Play -- only a single copy of the game is needed to take advantage of Trioncube's "versus" mode. And because this game's all about combos and keeping that combo string going, the battle can get quite heated with several turnabouts during the competition.

Hit the link below to check out the latest on Trioncube. The game ships in February...and that's when we'll post our full review.